This invention relates to an apparatus for routing data among terminals and a host computer system.
In certain environments such as banking or retailing, for example, it is desirable to share certain peripherals with a group of terminals. For example, in an effort to reduce the cost of small banking systems, it was desirable to provide one printing peripheral or module for several financial terminals. This is especially true for small bank branches. A common method of providing one printer for several financial terminals was to provide a mini-computer system which provided the communications interfaces among the several financial terminals. The mini-computer system was housed in a separate cabinet, requiring its own power supply and had a random access memory (RAM) which had to be programmed. This necessitated a system analyst at each bank to develop the necessary software which was unique for each bank.